Search Results for: Brooklyn

Eating to America

Naz Riahi | Longreads | November 2018 | 20 minutes (5,095 words)

The last meal I ate in Iran was a stew of cow tongue on white rice, its grains elongated by steam and enclosed in a perfect crispy tadig (crust), stained golden with saffron.

“What are you cooking?” I asked Shee Shee, my mom.

“Beef stew,” she lied, knowing I hated tongue.

It was May 19, 1990. The Iran-Iraq War had ended less than two years before, but the remnants of war — lack of provisions, jarred nerves from years of bombings — remained. Khomeini had died less than a year before. We’d thought his death would usher in a freer era, but not much had changed. I was 9 years old and we were at my aunt’s two-bedroom apartment in Tehran. My maternal grandparents were there, as well as my uncle, his wife and my four younger cousins. They’d all come for one last meal together, to say goodbye and to see me and Shee Shee off to our new life.

A few days before, we’d left my childhood home in Karaj (a suburb of Tehran) for the last time. I’d packed a couple of my favorite toys — a Barbie, a Cabbage Patch Kid — but had to leave most everything else behind — Mini Mouse, books, a dollhouse, my beloved Disney cartoons. Most of my toys and clothes, along with Shee Shee’s things, had been sold to friends and neighbors. What was left, my aunt promised to safeguard for me. Shee Shee had packed her favorite hair rollers — which 30 years later she still travels with — all of our photos, and Baba’s uniform, two pairs of his pajamas, his dog tag, his wings and his papers.

That afternoon, as our car pulled away from the only home I’d ever known, I turned around and waved goodbye. Pushing the lump of tears back down my throat, I made a silent promise to the house that I would come back as soon as I could and live there again.

Six months earlier, Baba, an esteemed navy captain and for nine months a political prisoner, had been executed. Shee Shee would later say we moved to America because she didn’t want me to grow up in the shadow of that tragedy, of my father’s death. But at the moment it didn’t feel like a choice. It felt like if we didn’t leave, we wouldn’t survive. She picked the U.S. because we already had family here and she picked May 19 for our departure, because it’s my older brother, Shabab’s birthday (he, too, was living in the States).

On that last night, at my aunt’s house, the mood was somber. Our escape was not the beginning of an adventure, but an abandoning of everything known, everyone loved. When the stew was nearly done, its aroma moved from the kitchen through the living room and into the master bedroom, where I was lying on the bed, listening to a Googoosh tape. Cow tongue smells like rot when it’s cooked. I’d been duped.

“Dinner’s ready,” Shee Shee called. I walked out of the room to join everyone I’d been avoiding for fear that I would cry in front of them, or worse, that they would cry in front of me.

Shee Shee carried the rice, already flipped over on the platter, out to meet the stew on the dining room table. Cooking the perfect Iranian rice takes practice, but making the perfect tadig is a combination of luck and instincts — one never knows if the crust will hold, if it will be thick and crispy or if it will burn or fall apart.

After dinner my uncle drove us to the airport. Our suitcases smelled of pistachios, salted and soaked in lime juice, and saffron — the best saffron in the world is Iranian — which we’d taken as gifts and to stock our new kitchen. As the airplane took off, I looked down at the lights of Tehran, wondering if my house was somewhere down below looking up at the sky for us.

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The Post on Anti-Semitism I Never Thought I’d Write

Businesses and properties owned by Jews were the target of vicious Nazi mobs during a night of vandalism that is known as "Kristallnacht". (Photo by © Bettmann/CORBIS/Bettmann Archive)

Today begins the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a nation-wide pogrom against Jews that took place across Germany and in parts of Austria on November 9th and 10th, 1938. Over the course of those two days, Germans smashed the windows of Jewish businesses and homes, burned synagogues, and committed deadly violence against Jews in the streets. Many consider the mass destruction that took place then to have marked a shift from ongoing, rampant anti-semitism to the official beginning of the Holocaust.

As a kid, in the ’70s, although I was occasionally made fun of for being Jewish, I thought that level of hatred and violence toward Jews had been relegated permanently to the past. But now, 80 years after Kristallnacht, I’m seeing I was wrong. Anti-semitism is on the rise again — in Europe, South America, the United States, everywhere.

It’s in my city of Kingston, New York, too. In my neighborhood. On my street.
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Partners in Crime: The Life, Loves & Nuyorican Noir of Jerry Rodriguez

Photo courtesy the author / Kensington Publishing / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael A. Gonzales | Longreads | November 2018 | 19 minutes (5,320 words)

It was the third week in August 2004 when my best friend of 23 years, the screenwriter, playwright, and noir author Jerry Rodriguez, called me to blow off steam. Although he never told me the reasons, he and his girlfriend were breaking up. She was an attractive light-skinned woman from the West Coast, a respected editor, music critic, and novelist with hair that belonged in a shampoo commercial and a Colgate smile. A moody Cancerian who proudly represented “The Bay,” she’d known Tupac personally and could recite the lyrics to Too Short songs. Jerry was sick with cancer off and on throughout their three-year relationship and was still ill when his girlfriend decided it was over.

Diagnosed on Good Friday 2001, a few weeks after noticing a swelling on the top of his right foot, the disease steadily progressed. “She said I have to be gone by Labor Day,” Jerry sighed. “I’ve already started packing.” I sucked my teeth. “Well, that still gives you a few weeks to figure it out,” I answered, trying to sound reassuring. “It’ll be cool, man, don’t worry about it. I’ll come by and help you tomorrow.”

“Thanks, man.” Jerry’s voice was deep and serious. A lover of Sinatra, he sometimes carried himself in that stoic Frankie way. He’d watched a lot of tough guy movies with Bogart, Cagney, Lancaster, Widmark, and Mitchum as a kid. In the living room sitting next to his dad, he became a lover of film dialogue that he could recite verbatim.

That phone call came a week after Jerry turned 42. Born under the sign of Leo, he was a natural leader who usually had a big roar, but not that evening. I came over the next day while his now ex-girlfriend was at the gym. There were white moving boxes scattered throughout the beautifully decorated apartment. Outside, it was Hades hot, but the space was comfortably chilled by an air conditioner. Theirs was a dwelling I knew well, having been over for dinner parties, Sunday nights watching The Sopranos, Monday evenings viewing 24, and dog-sitting when they were out of town. Next to the front door was a long, wide cage containing Jerry’s furry white ferret Bandit. I could smell the Café Bustelo brewing.

Brooklyn Hospital was across the street, and the sounds of sirens were constant. Jerry would usually be talking about some new project or telling me about the folks from his day job at a Bronx drug clinic, but that day he was church-mouse quiet. Glancing at him, I sipped the strong coffee and placed familiar books in a box. I knew exactly what was coming next. After a few false starts, he blurted, “Look, if I can’t find a place right away, can I come stay with you for a little while?” I looked at him and smiled, knowing that in New York City, apartment-hunting-time “a little while” could mean anything from six months to six years.

For the previous few years, since my girlfriend Lesley passed away suddenly, I’d lived alone in Crown Heights. The last thing I wanted to do was share space with anyone. Still, how could I say no? He’d always been there for me, especially after Lesley’s brain aneurysm. The afternoon of her funeral, after everyone was gone, Jerry and I stood together in the empty New Jersey graveyard as my mind tried to process my plight. I was afraid to go home and face the empty Chelsea apartment Lesley and I shared, and Jerry understood my dilemma. “Let’s go to the movies and see The Iron Giant,” he said casually after we’d slipped into the limo back to Manhattan. I smiled for the first time since claiming her body at St. Vincent’s Hospital. For the next two weeks, he visited me every day after work.

All of that came back to me as I contemplated his question about moving in. “Of course, you can stay with me,” I answered, “but is the ferret coming too?” Then it was Jerry’s turn to smile.
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Home Again, Home Again: A Reading List

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“Home, I began to feel, was the half-formed beliefs you fashioned in the middle of all you didn’t and couldn’t understand, a tent on a wide, empty plain.”

-Pico Iyer

Nine or 10 months after I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, my parents packed up all of our belongings in a Mazda 323, and drove us away from my natal home. My parents took the Alcan highway through Canada, and then made their way down to Texas, where we lived for a couple of years before moving again. There are photos from that initial journey. In some, I am lolling on a viewing platform in Yellowstone National Park, and in others, I’m bundled up in a snowsuit, unnamed mountains behind me. My parents tell me I remained watchful in the backseat, my eyes trained on the scenery as it flushed from snowy white to green.

After Texas, we maintained a peripatetic existence, moving to Louisiana, then back to Alaska again. Though I learned early on in my life that we didn’t live anywhere long enough to change the walls from sellable beige, the idea of home didn’t concern me until my first-grade year, when my parents suggested we move to a small seaport city on the edge of Borneo, the second-largest island in Indonesia. We spent six years in Indonesia, only moving once from Borneo to Java. It was the longest I lived anywhere. Not knowing as an elementary schooler the layers of privilege that complicated my presence there, I allowed myself to feel as though I had found a home. I learned to pull nectar from the pink flowers outside my front door, speak Bahasa Indonesia, and scooter past the monitor lizards on my way to school. America — the country people often reminded me I was from — became the other end of infrequent long-distance phone calls, during which I’d listen to the crackling, faraway voices of people I loved. When we returned to the States once a year, well-meaning family and friends would always say, welcome home or I’m so glad you’re back. I felt, in those moments, as though there were two of me, both versions shimmering and illusory. I didn’t fully belong in Indonesia, but I also couldn’t understand how I fit into the landscape of technicolor grocery-store aisles and the dazzling suburban asphalt streets of a country that others called mine.

My family found out we were moving from Indonesia while on summer leave in the U.S., so I never got the chance to return or say goodbye. My memories from the formative years I spent there are buried somewhere deep within me — for years, I have felt too homesick to let myself remember. It is only in certain moments — the voice of a woman speaking Bahasa Indonesia rising from a crowded venue in Oregon, the echo of an adzan from a mosque — that I allow my memories from those days to unfurl like lush rainforest leaves, broad and green and glossy, beading with dew and bursting with song.

I move every two to four years now, and I am always filled with anticipation, hoping for a place that will hold me. I feel rootless, capable of fitting in anywhere, but not truly belonging. Most of the time I carry these thoughts quietly within myself, but I have found comfort in the way others voice complications with the idea of home. How much of who we are stems from the places that bear us? What does it mean to long for a home that doesn’t exist in the way it once did? What memories rise to the surface when you return to a long-forgotten place? What does it mean to be unable to return?

1. Reading ‘The Odyssey’ Far From Home (Azareen Van der Vliet, March 10, 2018, Electric Lit)

When Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi moves to South Bend, Indiana, she feels unmoored.

“Given the disorienting cartography of my life, there isn’t a singular home for me to return to. I am from nowhere; or, perhaps, I am from a constellation of places which habits and social codes violently contradict one another, leaving me empty handed.”

Van der Vliet Oloomi reads The Odyssey in Indiana, which helps her better understand her own nostalgia for an intangible place. Her encounter with the tale serves as an example of the power that literature, like place, has in offering an intersection between reality and possibility, solace and hope.

2. Baby Boy Born Birthplace Blues (John Jeremiah Sullivan, December 6, 2016, Oxford American)

When John Jeremiah Sullivan was young, a local paper in his hometown of New Albany, Indiana, ran an article about a boy who discovered a passageway that had once been part of the Underground Railroad. By researching old newspaper clippings reporting on runaway slaves, instances of racial violence, and the origins of blues music, Sullivan unravels myth to reveal truths about the complex and rich history of the place he “was raised in and where occurred the events that most shaped and damaged me as a human being.”

3. A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home (Jamila Osman, January 9, 2017, Catapult)

While watching salmon return to the site of their birth to lay thousands of eggs of their own, Jamila Osman feels a pang of jealousy at the certainty of the fish, their ability to find their way back to a point of origin. In this lyrical, haunting essay, Osman chronicles her parents’ journey from Somalia to Canada to Portland, Oregon, and reckons with grief after the death of her sister, the shortcomings of maps, and how her own identity has been shaped significantly by loss and place.

“A country is impossible to contain; a people are impossible to boil to the silt of parchment. A map is only one story. It is not the most important story. The most important story is the one a people tell about themselves.”

4. Enduring Exile (Alia Malek, October 15, 2013, Guernica)

When Anto’s neighbors warn him that he’s no longer safe in northwestern Syria, he heeds their warning, quickly shuttering the windows of his restaurant and inn, and selling what possessions he could. Alia Malek not only tells the story of Anto’s displacement in this harrowing journalistic essay, but also writes about the devastating effects of the Armenian Genocide and the way Anto’s family’s relationship to the idea of home was permanently altered as a result.

“He was curious to visit Armenia, even if it wasn’t really Armenia, and he wasn’t really from this Armenia.”

5. Fountain Girls (Samantha Tucker, Fall/Winter, 2016 Ecotone)

“There are Fountain girls who try to leave, but cannot outrun their hometown legacy; there are Fountain girls who never even stumble upon the chance to try.”

By deftly weaving together her own personal narrative about her upbringing in Fountain, Colorado and the death of her brother Ronnie, with the death of a “Fountain girl” named Tara, Tucker illuminates how a place can hold you in its grasp, even after you’ve physically left it behind.

“Where, in our reach for something better—an enlistment, an education, a steady job, a family, the dream—where do we, instead, cycle back, or discover our beginnings have inevitably been our end?”

6. Looking for Home in the Palestinian Diaspora (Marcello Di Cintio, September 24, 2018 Hazlitt)

Over 70 years have passed since Palestinians were first displaced by the Palestine War in the late 1940s, and many of the refugees living in UNRWA-administered camps have not been able to return to their ancestral homes. After Palestinian author Mona Abu Sharekh guides Marcello Di Cintio through Shati refugee camp in Gaza, Di Cintio begins to wonder “about the descendants of refugees who live far from the villages their grandparents lost — not just across a fence, but across an ocean.” Di Cintio meets with several Palestinian poets in Brooklyn in order to bear witness how both literature and heritage inform their conceptions of home.

“‘My father infected in us a nostalgia for Palestine,’ Hala said. Though she’d never seen Palestine, she came to love the place because of her father’s love.”

7. A Woman’s Choice — Sexual Favours or Lose her Home (Jessica Lussenhop, January 11, 2018, BBC News)

Broke and homeless, newly released from prison, Khristen Sellers was offered an abandoned trailer under the condition that she’d clean it herself. She did, but when the inspector came by, he “asked her if she ‘gives head’” and implied that “his signature on the inspection was the only thing standing between her and a place to live. Sellers is not the only one to experience this kind of harassment.

“In a post-Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo world, most people are well aware sexual harassment occurs in the workplace. But across the US, women are subjected to it in a far more intimate setting – their homes.”

In this piece, Jessica Lussenhop chronicles the experiences of sexual harassment that many women tenants have experienced, the flaws in the system that allow for such egregious incidents, and related legislation.

8. Home by (Chris Jones, Jaunary 29, 2007 Esquire)

After the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated before re-entry in February, 2003, Donald Pettit, Captain Kenneth Bowersox, and Nikolai Budarin were left stranded in space. Through interviews with the crew, and research about the surrounding circumstances, Chris Jones, in this moving piece of longform journalism, writes about what it means to be suspended far from Earth’s comforts and minutiae, not knowing when — or how — you’ll be able to return.

“And sometimes you’re no longer a month away from home–you’re suddenly much farther, although you’re not really sure how far, because the miles are meaningless.”

* * *

Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and illness.

Celebrating a Profound Literary Inheritance: Glory Edim on the Well-Read Black Girl Anthology

Authors Jesmyn Ward, Jacqueline Woodson, and Lynn Nottage. Tina Fineberg / Associated Press, Jessica Gow / Associated Press, Charles Sykes / Associated Press

Joshunda Sanders | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,718 words)

More than three years ago, in July 2015, Glory Edim sent her first Well-Read Black Girl newsletter, describing how she came to personally experience Black Girl Magic for the first time: through an “enchantment with storytelling” that began with Eloise Greenfield’s Honey, I Love and Other Love Poems.

Greenfield’s first book of poems, Honey, I Love was initially published in 1978 before subsequent reissues and has become a modern-day classic. Long before renewed calls for representation and increased diversity in children’s literature, Greenfield wrote a picture book inspired by the title poem alone. It was illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon and features a Black girl on the cover — in part because, though Greenfield went on to write 40 books, she was unable to find books for her own children to read and see themselves in before she wrote her own.

“I liked that phrase, ‘Honey, let me tell you,’” Greenfield said in a 1997 National Council of Teachers of English profile. “It was a phrase that was used a lot by African American people, but it had not reached the point where it had become stereotyped. So I wanted to use that, and that’s where the title came from. And I wanted to write about things that children love, about childhoods where there may or may not be much money, but there’s so much fun.”

These sentiments from Greenfield — taking a Black expression usually uttered with intimacy between women and making it a public affirmation of love centered on children — shaped for Edim a landscape of possibility. “I recognized myself immediately on the page;” Edim writes, “a Black girl with wide eyes, full lips, and thick braided hair. The book was my first introduction to poetry that was full of rhythm and everyday language. I was delighted to learn that my trip to the grocery store could be a poem.”

At five years old, Edim was proud to be Black. It set her on a path that would lead her to establish a lifelong ritual of reading as self-discovery — from Greenfield to “authors like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou – and many more…their books and profound literary legacy have become my inheritance.” Read more…

The Secrets We Keep

Markus Spiske / Unsplash / Getty Images, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Deena ElGenaidi | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,651 words)

 

My dad pulled his car over — the Jeep Wrangler he’d bought after divorcing my stepmom — to tell me that he’d gotten secretly married a year ago.

“M said you think I’m a hypocrite,” he’d said a few minutes earlier, just before putting the car in park.

He’d come to New York for the day to see me.

“I didn’t — what did M tell you?”

I was sure my aunt hadn’t betrayed my trust fully, that she couldn’t have told him what I’d found: the women’s bath products in his bathroom, signs that he was still dating the woman 20 years his junior. I was 28 at the time of the discovery, which would have made her 35. I knew that despite his Islamic religious beliefs, he was likely having sex before getting married.

“She said you think I’m a hypocrite because she’s not Muslim,” he said, the second “she” referring to Alexa, the woman whose name we both avoided saying out loud.

My dad had been twice divorced — first from my mom when I was 4, then from Anne-Marie, the woman he married when I was 10 and stayed married to for about 15 years. Now, he’d moved on to someone younger, someone only 7 years older than me.

I told him the truth, that about a year earlier, I’d gone into his room to see if he had any suitcases I could borrow for my trip to Southeast Asia, and spotted the flowery body wash, the women’s deodorant, the pink razor.

“I don’t care what you do,” I said, with the knowledge that I also kept secrets.

Still, though, I felt anger at my father’s hypocrisy. He claimed to be religious and was often judgmental of those who weren’t — judgmental of me. For years, I’ve kept my own secrets from my parents. I grew up in an Egyptian, Muslim home, and in many ways, keeping secrets has been my mode of self-preservation, as it is for many children of immigrants. My family is conservative — not politically, but in their everyday lives. They don’t drink or believe in sex before marriage, and if you are dating someone, it is with the intention of eventually marrying them. They expect their children to uphold the same Islamic values, and they’d prefer us to marry within our own culture, if possible. In this sense, it’s ironic that my dad has been with two white women — Anne-Marie and now Alexa — whose cultural backgrounds are starkly different from his.

I’ve talked to other children of immigrants, and children of religious parents, and have found an almost universal experience among us all. Though the values vary depending on culture, there is the same sense of understanding between us. Our parents, unlike many white parents, absolutely cannot know about certain aspects of our lives. A part of me is afraid to disappoint and disillusion them, but now knowing of my dad’s secrets, I wonder if I even care about their finding out about mine anymore.

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Theater of Forgiveness

Illustration by Buff Ross

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)

 

On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.

***

June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.

By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.

Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.

As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.

It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?

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Dress You Up in My Love

Thomas Northcut / Getty

Doree Shafrir | Longreads | October 2018 | 12 minutes (3,123 words)

It never fully dawned on me that Halloween was really a holiday for kids until I was trying, and failing, to have a child myself. But really, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me in my 20s and much of my 30s, when Halloween seems like the ultimate party for adults — an excuse to prove, via costume, just how clever and/or how sexy you are. Then one day, bam, it hits you: you’ve outgrown sexy adult party Halloween, and all your friends are doing daytime kid-party Halloween and taking their baby pirates and toddler dinosaurs trick-or-treating while it’s still light out, and since you’ve been trying to have a baby for two-and-a-half years it’s a little much to be bombarded with all these photos on Instagram for, like, three days straight. So instead you’re at home watching The Crown because it’s basically the chamomile tea of television and that’s about all you can handle right now.

Since Halloween is now a several-day spectacle, it’s hard to escape, and last year, Halloween fell on a Tuesday, so naturally the weekend before was filled with festivities. Compounding my misery at seeing everyone’s kids looking even cuter than usual for days on end was that the week before, we’d found out the IVF embryo we’d transferred “wasn’t viable,” as they say in the biz. I’d been pregnant for about 4.5 seconds — my blood tests had shown me to be barely pregnant, and from the beginning the doctor had told me there was only a very slim chance it was going to make it. But I’d been in an agonizing limbo for a week-and-a-half while the embryo — a girl, which we knew because it had been biopsied and tested for chromosomal abnormalities before we had our doctor insert it, via a catheter, in my uterus — took its sweet-ass time deciding whether or not it was going to stick around. It probably heard me talking about the wage gap and how we were all going to die in natural disasters because of climate change and was like, nah, I’m good.

So I was already deep into self-pity mode when Halloween came around. I hadn’t been asked to go to a single Halloween party, except for a kids’ party that I had been invited to because the host clearly felt sorry for me after it came up in a gathering where I was the only one without kids. “You should totally come!” she said, in the bright, cheery, please-don’t-actually-come-it-will-just-be-awkward-for-everyone way that people who have kids and are currently pregnant invite people who have been trying to have kids for two years to their kid-oriented gatherings. So of course, I didn’t go. My husband Matt was away for Halloween weekend, because he’d taken an eight-week job hosting a TV show that required him to be in New York every weekend. This was week four, so we were deep into long-distance marriage territory, and I was starting, a little bit, to lose it. I was alone with our dog Beau, who, thanks to his behavior issues (namely, his predilection for lunging aggressively at strangers and acting like he was going to bite their heads off), couldn’t dress up like a carton of French fries and participate in any kind of dog costume festivities. My social media feeds were filled with pictures of parties, literal and figurative, that I hadn’t been invited to.
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On Blackface, Bert Williams, and Excellence

Publicity still portrait of American stage actor and Vaudeville comedian Bert Williams, 1915. (Photo by John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images)

“Who doesn’t wanna look like Diana Ross?” journalist Megyn Kelly asked panelists Tuesday morning on her news show, during a segment about Halloween costumes. She was defending former Housewife Luanne de Lesseps, who dressed up last year in a crude costume that looked nothing like the glamorous Ross, with a white jumpsuit, a tower of a curly wig, and darkened skin. “She wants to look like Diana Ross for the day — I don’t know how that got racist on Halloween,” Kelly said. Her claim to the harmlessness of blackface betrayed an empathy problem, but also an ignorance that was too much to ignore; NBC’s top brass reacted swiftly. It seems for that and, (likely, mostly), the show’s lackluster ratings, the commentator’s morning show was canceled. At least publicly, blackface is universally condemned now, and understood to be borne of racist intentions. But Kelly’s comments reveal several truths about a complicated anxiety at the heart of American entertainment and the tradition of minstrelsy upon which it all resides.

* * *

I caught a screening of the silent film Lime Kiln Club Field Day earlier this fall, at an independent theater in Brooklyn. Possibly the oldest surviving set of moving images with a cast of Black actors, Lime Kiln has made rounds on the independent circuit since 2014, when it first released to the public. It was made a century earlier, in 1913, and restored from a trove of negatives found in MoMA’s film department. Legendary vaudevillian Bert Williams, born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1874, stars. He plays a lovable, almost clever oaf who competes with three other gentlemen for a local woman’s favor.

The actors in Lime Kiln filmed scenes of leisure: sitting in a local club and at tables in their homes, walking on sidewalks, and, at a raucous field day, dancing a cakewalk. Bert Williams is excellent in the role. His impressive comic timing, flexible, open face, long-limbed stature and commanding posture make it impossible to look anywhere else. He plays the role in blackface — a mask of burnt cork, a kinky wig, long black gloves. The rest of the cast does not. MoMA’s associate curator Ron Magliozzi called this “a sop to the white audience,” and noted “the fact that the lead wore blackface allowed the rest of the cast not to wear blackface before white audiences.” Camille Forbes, author of Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Star told me in an email that the mask for Black performers of that era “might be considered the price of admission to the entertainment world,” and that fair skinned Blacks, especially, were under pressure to cork up.

It is because minstrelsy, the theatrical practice that began in the urban North in the 1830’s, in which white men ridiculed southern Blacks, “established the representation of blackness, in the society at-large and entertainment in particular,” said Forbes. Its singular popularity fueled its influence. According to the scholar Eric Lott:

Minstrel troupes entertained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface performance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have figured significantly in the white Imaginary of the United States.

When Williams filmed Lime Kiln Club Field Day, America’s motion picture industry was not yet two decades old. Production on D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation began the same year. When it released in 1915, it became the first blockbuster, and its direct nods to minstrelsy (white actors blacking up to play one-note, not-quite-human black characters and blatant Confederate nostalgia) reinvigorated the Klan. Lime Kiln Field Day lingered in post-production and, despite its shortcomings, forms a contrast, an alternate history —one of  Black excellence in American performance. It showed Black characters struggling toward their own goals, with back stories.  Lime Kiln’s cast of 50-100 actors haven’t yet been all identified, but we know some performers had previously worked in the Harlem-based musical revue, “Darktown Follies,” which drew white audiences uptown. “Darktown Follies” anticipated the all Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along, which played a part in Harlem’s artistic flowering of the 1920s and 1930s and helped launch the careers of Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson.

Williams had been a working actor since starting out in 1893 in minstrels. He was a featured performer at Zeigfield’s Follies for nearly a decade starting in 1909. He also became a legitimate star of the record industry, composing and recording songs for Columbia Records. Once he started, he never abandoned blacking up, and he played several variations of the long-suffering “Jonah Man” throughout his career.

At my Brooklyn screening of Lime Kiln, a piano accompanist followed the drama in a jaunty ragtime. The reconstructed film lays out alternative takes of many scenes, arranged with an estimated chronology of the storyline, based on the feedback of lip readers MoMA hired to study the actors’ encounters. There’s also footage of the cast and crew between scenes. It is dizzying to watch some of the scenes in public space — there’s the blackface, as well as other humiliations like a wrestling match for discarded shoes and a watermelon eating contest. The audience was mostly white, with a smattering of Blacks, and sometimes, during close ups of Williams’ facial contortions, I felt a simmering discomfort at the laughter of my white neighbors. Still, Williams was known to have performed in only two other films, both shorts — A Natural Born Gambler and Fish — both released in 1916. The multiple takes in the Lime Kiln restoration reminded me how rare it is to see these particular actors in this particular way, how invaluable is every frame.

* * *

Williams stated in an interview that blacking up allowed him to find his actual humor, to conceive of himself, finally as a character. It explains the unsettling mix of feelings I had watching him being excellent, yet, still, to my eyes, debasing himself. By most accounts, he was an apolitical artist in a politicized age. During his professional life, the U.S. formalized rollbacks to Reconstruction and institutionalized Jim Crow; concerned citizens created institutions in response. W.E.B. Dubois’s Niagara Movement, the NAACP, Black Greek Letter Organizations, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs all arose during this era. What the scholar Imani Perry calls Black formalism — ritual practices “internal to the black community,” concretized. Some of the new Black organizations and associations that employed these rituals were purely social, with no explicit connection to politics, yet had an implied, vested interest in the sustenance and uplift of Black people in an apocalyptically difficult time.

Williams made no formal statement of protest, expressed no pro-Black sentiments on the record. He did chafe at the racist treatment he could not avoid, and claimed concern for racial uplift. He and ten other Black men in entertainment started the Frogs, a social club for Black artists based in Harlem. Williams led the art committee. Their aims were philanthropic, and also, to create an archive collection for a theatrical library. They held a popular annual social event, “The Frolic,” with a ball and vaudevillian revue. Many Black people held Williams’s accomplishments in esteem. The Black press assiduously and soberly covered his performances and business dealings. When he died in 1922 at age 47, after working through illness and collapsing near a stage after performing in Detroit, Forbes says Black critics “assess[ed] his role as a black man as well as his influence as a performer.” (Emphasis mine).

Eric Lott described the pull of minstrelsy as a combination of “love and theft,” which suppressed “the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed.” It was an attempt, in the anxious antebellum period, to enforce a social order, and in various eras of rampant social confusion, its tropes and formulations, which never really disappear, become lightning rods again. Kelly’s comments about walking in the skin of Diana Ross mirror this “love and theft,” and our current era is one where we may be approaching another nadir, another near-apocalyptic, broad loss of hard-won rights and access to the privileges of citizenship, similar to the cascading losses of Bert Williams’s time. It’s probably why our discourse is so contentious, even among friends and comrades. It helps explain our interest in relics like Lime Kiln. 

In a piece from the New York Times Magazine’s culture issue, Wesley Morris laments, “Everything means too much now.” He bemoans how “we’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.” It annoyed Morris that he couldn’t pan Insecure the way he wanted, without blowback, because it feels so “necessary” to see a Black woman beautifully shot, performing irreverent messiness and coming into her own. He’s right — we’re all entitled to art for its own sake. But everything has always meant a lot, and excellence has always been a factor, and the threads of politics and aesthetics rub up against each other all the time. Probably, we need to imagine even more lenses through which to think and talk about art and culture, and demanding the best, from everyone, on all fronts, may be the way we get through the difficulty that could be coming.

 

 

Help Us Fund More Original Essays (and Great Art to Go with Them)

It’s that time of year again, when for two weeks, my Twitter feed reads like a public radio fund-drive. That’s right, it’s Longreads’ annual member drive.

We’re working hard right now to raise $50,000 for our original story fund by Sunday, November 4th — a number that turns into $200,000 when you consider that WordPress.com matches every dollar contributed times three. We need your help to achieve this goal — to be able to fund more original stories.

At Longreads we pride ourselves on paying contributors fairly. The money we raise during our member drive is used to pay writers, editors, art directors, fact-checkers, copyeditors, illustrators, photographers, transcribers, translators and others who help us publish original pieces throughout the year.

It’s used to fund not only ground-breaking journalism — for instance Leah Sottile’s article and podcast series, Bundyville, a collaboration with Oregon Public Broadcasting — but also personal essays, which we’ve been publishing more of than ever before.

As Longreads’ Essays Editor — and a reader — I feel strongly that personal narratives have never been more important than they are now, when the world needs more awareness of, and empathy for, people’s different experiences. Publishing personal essays allows us to amplify diverse voices, and also to give chances to new writers who are just starting out. I believe personal essays can be as effective as hard reporting in conveying important ideas, and perhaps even more so in terms of opening people’s hearts and minds.

I consider myself incredibly fortunate to get to work at a publication that recognizes the value of personal essays, pays writers fairly for them, and makes room in its editorial calendar for two or more of them each week.

Becoming a member — or making a one-time donation whether or not you already are a member — helps us to keep publishing a broad mix of essays from a wide variety of writers.

It’s impossible to choose my favorite particular essays that we’ve published, but in the interest of persuading you to contribute, I’d like to point to a few that have made me especially proud to have the opportunity to do this work, and to be part of the incredible Longreads team. Please notice, too, the art that accompanies these pieces — original illustrations by various artists, and collages by our art director, Katie Kosma. Member funding helps pay for these, too. Read more…